Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (107 page)

The caravan master was unhappy at how slow business was. “What good does it do me to be tax-free if no one is buying?”

“What good would it do you to be rich when the Yezda swoop down on you?” Marcus retorted.

“I can’t say you’re wrong,” Tahmasp admitted, “but I’d like it better if it didn’t look so much like they already had.”

His complaint held justice. As the Arshaum traveled east toward Amorion, to the eye they might have been just one more nomadic band
drifting into Videssos in the wake of the imperial defenses’ collapse after Maragha. At a distance, even the Yezda took them for countrymen. Small parties of horsemen passed them several times without a second glance. And to the Videssians, they seemed as frightful as the rest of the nomads. Even Goudeles’ formidable eloquence was not always enough to win the locals’ confidence.

“Can’t hardly trust nobody these days,” one grizzled village elder said when finally coaxed out of his home, a building whose fresh stonework showed an eye for defense. He hawked and spat. He spat very well, being without front teeth in his upper jaw. He went on, “We would have had trouble ourselves last year, but for dumb luck.”

“How’s that?” Tahmasp asked. He seemed a bit less morose than he had; the villagers were coming out to buy, once they saw nothing had happened to their leader. Women exclaimed over lengths of cloth dyed Makuraner-style in colorful stripes and argued with merchants about the quality of their bay leaves while their husbands fingered the edges of daggers and tried to get the most in exchange for debased goldpieces.

The old man spat again. “We was holding a wedding feast—my granddaughter’s, in fact. Next morning when we go out to tend our herds, what do we find? Tracks to show a Yezda war party had come right close to the edge of town, then turned round and rode like Skotos was after ’em. Must’ve been the singing and dancing and carrying on fooled ’em into thinking we had soldiers here, and they lit out.”

“A genuine use for marriage,” Goudeles murmured, “something I had not previously believed possible.” Having met the bureaucrat’s wife, a rawboned harridan who only stopped talking to sleep, Marcus knew what prompted the remark.

The elder took it for a joke and laughed till he had to hug his skinny sides. “Hee, hee! Tell that to my missus, I will. I’ll sleep in the barn for a week, but worth it, gentlemen, worth it.”

“Be thankful you’re after having one to rail at ye, now,” Viridovix said, which perplexed the Videssian but failed to dampen his mirth, leaving both of them dissatisfied with the exchange.

The journey across the plateau country put all of Tahmasp’s gifts on display. He always knew which stream bed would be dry and which had water in it, which band of herdsmen would sell or trade a few head of cattle and which run them deep into the badlands at first sight of strangers.

He also had a knack for knowing which routes would have Yezda on them and which would be clear. The Arshaum only had to fight once, and then briefly. A band of Yezda collided with Arigh’s vanguard and skirmished until the rest of the plainsmen came up to help their comrades, at which point their foes abruptly lost interest in the encounter and withdrew.

Along with his other talents, the swashbuckling caravaneer was soon fluently profane in the Arshaum tongue. His huge voice and swaggering manner made the plainsmen smile, but before long they were obeying him as readily as they did Arigh, who shook his head in bemused respect. “This once I wish I could write like you do,” he remarked to Gorgidas one day. “I’d take notes, I really would.”

For all Tahmasp’s skills, though, there was no escaping the fact the invaders were loose in the westlands. Broken bridges, the burned-out shell of a noble’s estate, unplanted cropland all told the same story. And once the Arshaum traversed a battlefield where, by the wreckage still lying about, both sides had been Yezda.

As was his way, Gorgidas looked for larger meanings in what he saw. “That field shows Videssos’ hope,” he said when they camped for the evening. “It is the nature of evil to divide against itself, and that is its greatest weakness. Think of how Wulghash and Avshar fell out with each other instead of working together against their common enemy.”

“Well said!” Lankinos Skylitzes exclaimed. “At the last great test, Phos will surely triumph.”

“I didn’t say that,” Gorgidas answered tartly. Skylitzes’ generalizations were not the sort he was after.

Gaius Philippus irritated both the Greek and the Videssian by objecting. “I wouldn’t lump Avshar and Wulghash together. You ask me, they’re different.”

“How, when they both seek to destroy the Empire?” Skylitzes said.

“So did the Namdaleni last year—and would again if they saw the chance. Wulghash, from what I saw of him, is more like that—an enemy, aye, but not wicked for wickedness’ sake, if you take my meaning. Avshar, now …” The senior centurion paused, shaking his head. “Avshar is something else again.”

No one argued that.

Marcus said, “I think there’s something wrong with your whole scheme, Gorgidas, not just with the detail of how evil Wulghash is—though I read him the same way Gaius does.”

“Go on.” The prospect of a lively argument drew Gordigas more than criticism bothered him.

Scaurus picked his words with care. “It strikes me that faction and mistrust are part of the nature of mankind, not of evil alone. Otherwise how would you explain the strife Videssos has seen the last few years, or for that matter, Rome, before we came here?”

When the Greek hesitated, Skylitzes gave his own people’s answer: “It is Skotos, of course, seducing men toward the wrong.”

That smug “of course” annoyed Gorgidas enough to make him forget for a moment how deeply the Videssians believed in their faith. He snapped, “Utter nonsense. The responsibility for evil lies in every man, not at the hand of some outside force. There would be no evil, unless men made it.”

That Greek confidence in the importance of the individual was something Marcus also took for granted, but it shocked Skylitzes. Viridovix had been sitting quietly by without joining the discussion, but when he saw the imperial officer’s face grow stern he tossed in one of the mordant comments that came easily to his lips these days: “Have a care there, Gordigas dear; can you no see the pile o’ fagots he’s building for you in his mind?”

On the steppe Skylitzes would have managed a sour smile and passed it off. Now he was back in his native land. His expression did not change. The discussion faltered and died. Sometimes, Marcus thought, the imperials were almost as uncomfortable to be around as their enemies—another argument against Gorgidas’ first thesis.

The little spring bubbled out from between two rocks; a streamlet trickled away eastward. “Believe it or not, it’s the rising of the Ithome,” Tahmasp said. “You can follow it straight into Amorion from here.”

“You’re not for town with us, then?” Viridovix asked disappointedly; the flamboyant caravaneer was a man after his own heart. “Where’s the sense in that, to be after coming so far and sheering off at the very end?”

“You’d starve as a merchant,” Tahmasp answered. “No trader in his right mind will hit the same city twice in one year. I’ve kept the bargain I had forced on me; now it’s time to think of my own profit again. A
panegyris
is coming up in Doxon in about two weeks. If I push, I’ll make it.”

Nothing anyone said would make him change his mind. When Arigh, who admired his resourcefulness, pressed him hard, he said, “Another thing is, I want out from under soldiers. Aye, your plainsmen have treated me better than I thought they would, but there’ll be a big army at Amorion, and I want no part of it. To a trader, soldiers are worse than bandits, because they have the law behind ’em. Why do you think I got out of Mashiz?” The Arshaum had no reply to that.

Tahmasp pounded Gaius Philippus on the shoulder. “You’re all right.” He turned to Scaurus, saying, “As for you, I’m glad I don’t have to bargain against you—a high mucky-muck and never let on! Well, now that I’m shut of you, I wish you luck. I have the feeling you’ll need it.”

“So do I,” the tribune said.

He did not think Tahmasp even heard him. The caravan master was shouting orders to his guardsmen and the merchants with him. The guards, under the capable direction of Kamytzes and Muzaffar, smoothly took their places. When the merchants dawdled, Tahmasp bellowed, “Last one in line is my present to the Arshaum!” That got them moving. His big shaved head gleaming in the sun, Tahmasp burst into bawdy song as his caravan pulled away from the plainsmen, and never looked back.

“There goes a free man,” Gaius Philippus said, following him with his eyes.

“Maybe so, but how long will he stay that way if Avshar wins? It’s our job to keep him free,” Marcus answered.

“Plenty of worse work, comes to that.”

The Arshaum followed the Ithome east. It swiftly grew greater as one small tributary after another added their waters to it. By the end of their first day of travel, it was a river of respectable size, and the land through which it passed was beginning to seem familiar to the Romans.

“At this rate, we’ll make Amorion in a couple of days,” Scaurus remarked as they camped by the side of the stream.

“Aye, and Gavras bloody well better be glad to see us, too,” Gaius Philippus said. “Seeing as how he’s sitting there, he’ll have a time saying we didn’t get it back for him.”

“I wonder.” Now that their goal was so close, the tribune found himself more and more apprehensive. Had the Avtokrator pledged him only nobility, he would have felt sure of his reward. But there had been more in the bargain than that.… He wondered how Alypia was.

Viridovix did nothing to help his self-assurance, saying, “Sure and a king’s a bad one for keeping promises, for who’s to make him if he doesna care to?” Despite having heard from the Romans that Thorisin had put Komitta aside, he was also uncertain of the welcome the Emperor had waiting for him. Fretting over that took his mind off other concerns.

Morning twilight roused the Arshaum with a jolt when their sentries caught sight of a squad of strange horsemen. “Careless buggers,” Gaius Philippus said, bolting down a wheatcake. “They stand out like whores at a wedding, silhouetted against the dawn that way. From any other direction, they’d be invisible.”

The riders showed no sign of pulling back after they were discovered. “The cheek o’ them now, looking us over bold as you please,” Viridovix said. He set his Gallic helmet firmly on his head; its crest, a seven-spoked bronze wheel, glinted red as his hair in the light of the just-risen sun.

Marcus shielded his eyes with his hand to study the horsemen, who still had not moved. “I don’t think that’s cheek,” he said at last. “I think it’s confidence. They have a big force somewhere behind them, unless I miss my guess.”

Gorgidas was also squinting into the sun. As he was a bit farsighted while Scaurus was the reverse, he saw more than the tribune. “They’re nomads,” he said worriedly. “What are the Yezda doing in strength so close to a big imperial army?”

Speculation ceased as they ran for their horses; most of the Arshaum
were already mounted and hooted at them for their slowness. “Took you long enough,” Arigh sniffed when they were finally in the saddle. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”

He led a hundred riders toward the strangers: in line, not column, but advancing slowly so as not to seem an open threat. Marcus could see the horsemen ahead reaching over their shoulders for arrows, but none of them raised a bow. Two or three were in corselets of boiled leather like those of the Arshaum, but most wore chain-mail shirts.

With a raised hand, Arigh halted his men at the extreme edge of arrow range. He rode forward alone. After a few seconds, one of the waiting riders matched the gesture. When they were about eighty yards apart, the Arshaum chief shouted a Khamorth phrase he had memorized: “Who are you?” By his looks, the approaching horseman could have been a Yezda or off the Pardrayan plain.

“Who are
you
?” The answer came back in oddly accented Videssian.

Marcus had heard that lilt before. He dug his heels into his pony’s sides and rode toward Arigh at a fast trot. Several Arshaum shouted for him to get back in his place. His own shout, though, was louder than theirs: “Ho, Khatrisher! Where’s Pakhymer?”